The intellectual scene in Post-independence India

suchandra · September 22, 2008

An Intellectual debate

A speech of S. Gurumurthy given to IIT Chennai

posted Monday 22 September, 2008

http://hindutva.rediffiland.com/blogs/2008/09/22/An-Intellectual-debate.html

... Defeat and anger go together. Abuse and defeat go together. So, it is in this norm and with this understanding of what an intellectual debate means, I would like to place before you some of my thoughts today. Some of may find it provocative. I am confident that the audience is competent enough to absorb this and think rather than get into the mood which all of us have got used to in the last 30-40 years abuse.

Background: India before Independence

Let us see the pre-independence background, the intellectual content of India. See the kind of personalities who led the Indian mind Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Gandhiji, Tilak- giants in their own way. Most of them were involved in politics, active politics, day-to-day politics, handling men, walking on the road, addressing meetings, solving problems between their followers. And, meeting the challenges posed by the enemy, the conspiracies hatched against them. They were handling everything, yet, they were maintaining an intellectual supremacy, and an originality which history has recorded.

Let us look at the academic side. Whether it is a P.C. Ray who wrote on Indian

Chemistry in 1905 or Sir C.V. Raman who wrote about mridangam, tabala, and violin, and saw the physics in it (this was in 1913); whether it was R.C. Majumdar or Radhakumud Mukherjee who saw greatness in the Indian civilization; trying to bring up points, instances, historical evidence to mirror the greatness of India to the defeated Indian race, they were all building the Indian mind brick by brick.

Sri Aurobindo spoke of Sanatana Dharma as the nationalism of India. He didn't rank it as a philosophy. He brought it down to the level of emotional consciousness. Swami Vivekananda spoke of spiritual nationalism; it was the same Swami who spoke of Universal brotherhood. For them philosophy was not removed from the ground reality. The nation was at the core of their philosophy. Swami Vivekananda was called the"patriot monk".

Mahatma Gandhi spoke of Rama Rajya. Bankim Chandra wrote Bande Maataram. The song, the slogans in it, the mantra in it made hundreds of people kiss the gallows smilingly and many others went to jail. It transformed the life of the people. This was the intellectual scene, this was the content. This is what powered the intellectual as well as the mass movement in India. This was the core of India, the soul of the Indian freedom movement.

The symptoms: India immediately after Independence

Imagine what happened in 1947 and after, India was able to intellectually lead not only Indians but also the whole world because of the intellectual assertion that the freedom movement brought about. Let us look at post Independence India. The persons who led post-Independence India were also trained in the same freedom movement. They went to jail, but they were not rooted in the intellectual content of the Freedom movement!

The first Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru was in jail for 7 years. He was a great intellectual, purely in the sense of his capacity to reason, understand, read, and expound a thought. He told Galbrieth once, "I would be regarded as the last English Prime Minister of India." See the intellectual capability of the man, the enormously competent mind.

But intellectualism doesn't exist in a vacuum. It has to be rooted in something concrete.Swami Vivekananda's universal brotherhood was rooted in India's greatness as a civilization. The concept of "Vasudaiva Kutumbakam" cannot exist without a living form, a population which believes in it and believes in itself. You need to have a society which believes in it.

That is why India could invite the Jews who were butchered, raped, all over the world. In 107 out of 108 countries, this race was butchered. At least they had the courtesy and the gratitude to publish a book. The Israeli government published a book that out of 108 countries that we sought refuge, the only civilization, the only country, the only people, the only ideology that gave us refuge was the Indian civilization. They published a book, which most Indians are unaware of.

And we invited the Muslims. The refugee Muslims first landed in Kutch. And they are called the Kutchy Memons even today but not the Memons who bomb Mumbai. But the Memons who lived with us.

In the year 1917, many of you might be aware, a case went to the Prey Council,

equivalent to the Supreme Court now. The Kutchy Memons went and told the Prey Council that we are Muslims for namesake, but we follow only the Hindu law. Please don't impose the Shariat on us. The Prey Council ruled that they are Muslims but the only sacred book they have is called "Dasaavathaara", it is not Koran. In fact they knew no language other than the Kutchy language.

And in the "Dasaavathaara", nine avatharas were common between Hindus and Kutchy Memons. We call the tenth avathaara "Kalki" and they call him "Ali". The Prey Council ruled that the Shariyat law is not applicable to them. The All India Muslim League took up the case, went to the British and told them that this finding is dangerous to Islam and requested them to pass a law which will overrule this judgment. The British government passed a law in 1923 which was called the "The Kutchy Memons Act" declaring, "If a Kutchy Memon wants to follow the Shariat, allow him to do so". It doesn't mean a Muslim must follow the Shariat. Between 1923-1937, before the All India Shariat Act was passed not a single Kutchy Memon filed an affidavit with the plea that he wants to follow the Shariaat. That was the integration prevalent in India. In 1937, when the All India Shariat Act was passed, the preamble to the act mentioned that this was being passed by a demand made by the AIML leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Today, the Shariat has become a part of Muslim consciousness.

The purpose behind making you aware of this background is that 99% of the people who speak about the constitutional rights of the minorities or the distinctiveness of Muslim life are unaware of the facts. Till the year 1980, in Cooch Behar district, the Shariat law was not applicable. In 32 instances between 1923 and 1947 by legislation, the Shariyat law was not applicable to the Muslims. This is the extent of the intellectual gap in India.

Secularism: A Reversal and perversion of the Indian mind.

And now, coming to what is the position today. Everything that drove the freedom

movement - everything that constituted the soul of the freedom movement, whether it is the Ram rajya of Gandhiji or Sanaatana Dharma of Sri Aurobindo or the spiritual patriotism of Vivekananda or the soul stirring Vande Maataram song, came to be regarded not only as unsecular but as sectarian, communal and even as something harmful to the country.

Thus, there was a reversal, a perversion of the Indian mind. How did it occur? Today, the intellectualism of India means to denigrate India. There are mobile citizens and there are non- citizens deriding India. Go to the Indian Airlines counter you will find people deriding India. Go to a post office they will deride India. Go to a railway station, they will deride India. It is the English educated Indian's privilege to deride India.When I was talking to postal employees in the GPO, Chennai (a majority of them were women). I told them the basic facts about the post office. I said it is one of the most efficient postal systems in the world, one of the cheapest in the world, one of the most delivery perfect postal systems in the world. For one rupee, you are able to transport information from one end of the country to the other.

And you have a postman, no where in the world this happens the postman goes to the illiterate mother and reads out the letter, he is asked to sit there and shares a cup of coffee and comes away. Money orders are delivered to the last rupee. It is an amazing system, one of the largest postal systems linking one of the most populous nations, one of the most complicated nations with so many languages.

Somebody writes the address in Tamil and it gets delivered in Patna! It gets delivered to Jawaan at warfront! When I completed my speech many of the women were wiping their tears. I asked why are you crying I have only praised you. They said, "Sir, this is the first time we've been praised, otherwise we've only been abused!"

You know how many people use the railways in India? A million people and that is

equivalent to the population of Australia! And we have only abuses for them!

Have we any idea of what this country is? India has been compared with Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan and Taiwan. You can walk across many of these countries in one night (laughs)! The best politicians, intellectuals, sociologists in India have compared us with them because, we have never understood what we are and unless you do that, you can never relate us with others.

Demonising India: Projecting a negative image.

This enormous intellectual failure, to the extent of being intellectually bankrupt, did not occur overnight, it was no accident. There is a history behind this enormous erosion. And I told you about these mobile citizens, what they have done to us. Every country has problems. There is no country without any problem. Are you aware of what is one of the most pressing problems in America today? It is incurable according to the American sociologists; even American economists have begun to agree with them. American politicians are shaken, one third of the pregnant women are school going children. And mothers mix the anti-pregnancy pill in the food without daughter's knowledge everyday.

But this is not the image of America. The image of America is a technologically

advanced country etc. etc. Ours is the only country where the mobile citizens of India have transformed the problems of India into the image of India -its identity is inherently related with its problems.

Go to any country and the same negative stereotype is echoed that India is suffering from poverty and malnutrition. India has no drinking water. Indian women are burnt. If they are married, they are burnt, if they are widows, they are burnt. See the image that has been built about this country. Who did this? The English educated Indian.

And one Kaluraam Meena (have you ever heard of him? Asks the audience to raise their hands if they have), only a small fraction of this large audience has heard of him. When Clinton came to India, he went to a village called Nayla where the villagers interacted with him. And one of the panchayat board members asked him, "Sir, I am told that in the West, all of you believe that this country is a rotten country, a backward country, a poor, hungry country. Do you also think like that?"

Clinton was shaken, because he might have thought that this person might be

approaching him for some favour. I will relate my experience when I went to the Carter Centre in 1993. They were talking about dispute resolution and all that. I went there to meet somebody, if not Carter, somebody else at least. His Deputy, a lady, was very hesitant to receive me. "Mr. Gurumurthy", she said, "Mr. Carter is not around, anyway, I can spare seven-eight minutes for you." I said three or four minutes of your time would do. Even before I could start, she said, "Mr.Gurumurthy, we don't have funds, we will not be able to help" (laughter from the audience). I replied, "Let us assume you have a hundred billion dollars, how much will you give me? One billion? One million?" She kept quiet, I said: "I don't need your money. I came here to discuss whether community living is an answer to disputes. I have come to discuss this because you have suggested electoral means to resolve problems in communities which have no damn idea of what an election is; whether community living is an answer because you don't what that means. She sat and discussed this with me for two hours. This is the image we have projected that anybody, who comes from India, comes to beg. Ordinary Indians did not create this impression; educated Indians created it. This is the work of civil servants, NGOs. Christian missionaries during the freedom movement created this.

Indians are filthy, rotten, dirty and unhealthy, advertising abroad these are the people who need to be saved. We have to Christianise them, enlighten them, and give us money. I can understand that because it is their business. But what did we do after 1947?

We repeated the same mistakes. We projected India as a country of unending problems. As I said, every country has problems. Only in India, problems become identities. How many dowry deaths take place in India in a year? Yet, India is projected as a country burning its own daughter-in-laws. And we also talk about it. Every damn newspaper will be writing about it. We believe in self-deprecation. And this goes on in the guise of intellectualism in India. And one woman, she attempted to take a film of the widows. I wrote an article, asking her to go to Lijjat Paapad. A widow brought me up. Millions of widows have worked to bring up their children. It is a nation, which believes in Tapasya. You may not believe in it but you are an exception. Compare Deepa Mehta"s attitude with Sarada Maa's who was the wife, who became a widow after Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa's passing away. She went to the very same place where Deepa Mehta went and saw the widows. Sarada Maa said, "These widows are so pure, they are an illustration and an example to me." Deepa Mehta saw them as prostitutes. The widows have already been hurt once. Why are you sprinkling salt on their wounds?

I am very sorry to speak about this, but I have to, this audience is enlightened enough to understand me. Indian women are sexually unsatisfied and so they are becoming lesbians? This is one bloody story against us, about us. This is the image of Indian men and women, and this film is in English. Catherine Mayo wrote a book and Mahatma Gandhi said about it, "I have no time to read this filth. But I am under a compulsion, under pressure because this has been published abroad. The image of India has been rubbished and I have to counter it." With this introduction, he wrote about the book and said that this woman is a gutter inspector (laughs).

The intellectualism in India is gutter inspection- people are of this kind etc. Understand the level of erosion.

Indian Politics: Weaknesses and Pitfalls

Let us look at the post independence scenario from the macro level. We installed a

system of governance and it postulated all the important goals for the Indian society and polity, which was gulped by the Indian academia, by the Indian intellectuals. We will have a classless society through socialism. We will have a casteless society through equality. We will have a faithless society through secularism. We will have a modern society devoid of tradition.

Instead of politics restructuring caste, caste has restructured politics today. Political

parties are talking only in terms of castes. Has any Indian intellectual come to terms

with caste? You must understand caste if you want to handle the Indian society. You cannot say that I want to have a very different kind of society. You have to handle the Indian sentiment, the Indian tradition and Indian beliefs. You can't clone a society of your choice in India. Social engineering has failed everywhere; the masters of social engineering have given up the Communists - whether it is sociologists or economists you have to accept a society as it is. You can only increase the momentum of evolution in the society; you can't forcibly bring about a revolution today. But, Indian leaders and intellectuals, till today, keep abusing caste. They don't know how to handle the caste. Let me narrate to you how a community in Karaikudi handled this issue. The Chettiyar community assembled top businessmen, professionals from all over the world for 3days to discuss their culinary act, how to construct houses, what languages they use,what old adages and stories their grand parents used to tell, what clothes they used to wear; not one word of politics, mind you. This was not even published in the newspapers. Intellectuals were not even aware of it. So, caste is a very important instrument in India, you may not like it. Unfortunately, every intellectual leads a caste life inside, but outside he is casteless! He is cloning an approach outside. There is no intellectual honesty at all.

And what happened in the case of secularism? In India, any one who is not a Hindu is per se secular. In the year 1947, just 10 years had passed after the Muslim League demanded and got the country partitioned, the leader who voted for the resolution for the partition of India was Quazi Millath Ismail, (who was leading the same Muslim League on the Indian side), the Congress certified that the Muslim League in Kerala is secular and hence it can associate with them. The Muslim League outside Kerala is communal with the same president! Three hundred and fifty crores are spent today for the Haj pilgrims out of the funds of secular India every year. No one can raise an objection. At least I can understand why politicians don't want to do that because they want the Muslim votes. But what about the intelligentsia. What about newspaper editors and journalists? And academicians? None of them speak out. The reason is that we have produced a state dependent intellectualism in India. We don't produce Nakkeerans anymore, our intellectualism is a derivative of the State and the State is a derivative of the polity. And in turn the polity is a derivative of the mind of Macaulay and Marx.

The Indian education system: A Legacy of Macaulay.

This Macaulayian system of education is a poison injected into our system. At least I had the opportunity of schooling in Tamil and hence could withstand the corruption that this English education brings with it. This corruption begins the moment the child steps out of the house. He is told to converse in English at home. This did not happen even in pre-Independence India, even when Macaulay wrote that notorious note sitting in Ooty. How many of you know Macaulay's formulation? Just those two or three sentences at least which form the crux - "We require an education system in India which will produce a class of interpreters, who will be Indian in colour and Englishmen in taste, opinions and morals."

This is the education system, which we have been continuing with, which was earlier conceived to produce clerks for the British Empire. If you have to differ from an English educated person you have to differ only through the English language. If you have to abuse somebody, even that has to be done in English! If you abuse the Anglicised Indian, he will not find fault with the blame but with the grammar in your language! This is the extent to which a foreign language has possessed us. But, we must master English, that is needed, but why do we have to become slaves of the English language? We must use that language as a tool, but why do we consider it as a status symbol? This is the influence of Macaulay.

If you want to understand the Macaulay/Marxist mix in India, you have to go a little back to see how Marxism grew out of the Christian civilisation. I recommend that you read the Nov 27, 1999 edition of the Newsweek, which describes how the Christian idea of the end of time called the "apocalypse", influenced the entire history, art, music, prognosis, sociology, economics, and the entire attitude of the Christian civilisation towards the non-Christian civilisations.

A Christian scholar who describes how Communism grew out of Christianity has

written it. In 1624, Anna Baptists, a group of Christians who believed in the basic tenets of Christianity seized power in a particular place, banned private property and use of any book other than the Bible. When Marxism came up later through the exposition of Das Capital, the Marxists began expounding their doctrine as an extension of Christianity.

The thesis, antithesis and synthesis of making Christianity acceptable to the age of

enlightenment was the Hegelian way demanded rationalisation of Christianity in the

days of the Protestant movement. Hegel began with a disagreement, then started

interacting with Christianity and ultimately ended up accepting Christianity.

You can see the same phenomenon with Marxist postulates- "capitalism is my enemy, we have to deal with capitalism" and finally "we have to find a synthesis with capitalism".

Marx on India

In fact in the year 1857, Marx wrote about India, " India was a prosperous civilisation. It had a very high standard of living. Their productivity was higher. India was an economic giant." It was so. If you look at the statistics in 1820, India's share of world production was 19%, and England's share was 9%, please note that Britain was deep into the industrial revolution at that time. 18% of the world trade was in Indian hands at that time whereas 8% was the figure for Britain and 1% for US. When 80% of the American population was engaged in agriculture, India had 60% of the population engaged in non-agricultural occupations. This is supposed to be an index of development. All these statistics can be found in Paul S. Kennedy's "Rise and Fall of Great Powers". So, Marx says, "This was a great civilisation which had produced prosperous communities." A prosperity which went deep into the villages. In the early stages, when the East India Company came to Murshidabad, an unknown name in Bengal today the Britishers were awe struck with its prosperity and wrote that it was more prosperous than London. This is no more disputed anyway, even by Indian intellectuals. Marx acknowledges the fact that this was a prosperous country and also had equality but unfortunately, he says for 2000 years the society did not change nor did it allow any revolutionary forces to enter! In his worldview human beings cannot progress without a revolution!

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